The Long Undoing of Iran–Israel Relations

Centuries before the state of Israel appeared on a map, before Zionism or kibbutzim or the Balfour Declaration, the Jews had been exiled in Babylon. The year was 539 BCE when Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Empire, conquered Babylon and issued a decree allowing the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple. This act, recorded in the Hebrew Bible in the Book of Ezra, was so transformative that Cyrus is the only non-Jew ever referred to as “Messiah” (anointed one) in the Jewish canon. Jewish texts praise him as a liberator chosen by God. Jewish communities across the Persian Empire flourished under Persian protection, and Persian kings—Cyrus, Darius, and Artaxerxes—are remembered favourably in Jewish tradition for their tolerance and patronage.

This set the tone for centuries of relatively harmonious Jewish life under Persian rule, from the Achaemenids to the Sassanids. The Book of Esther, set in the Persian capital of Susa, unfolds under the reign of Ahasuerus (widely identified with Xerxes I), where a Jewish woman becomes queen and thwarts a genocidal plot against her people. That story gave rise to Purim, a festival of survival and salvation, still celebrated today. Its backdrop is unmistakably Persian, and its villains and heroes are woven into the shared lore of both peoples.

Later, under Sassanian rule (224 to 651 CE), the Jewish academies of Babylonia—Sura and Pumbedita—thrived, compiling what became the Babylonian Talmud, one of the cornerstones of rabbinic Judaism. Persian kings granted the Jewish community internal autonomy, allowing a high degree of self-governance under the Exilarchs, the political heads of Babylonian Jewry who traced their lineage to King David.

This historical intimacy of protection and patronage stands in stark contrast to the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE or the later inquisitions and expulsions Jews faced in Europe. In the Persian world, Jews were often considered “People of the Book”, protected by imperial law, engaged in commerce, medicine, and administration. Even in the modern era, under the Qajar and early Pahlavi dynasties, Iran’s Jewish community retained a measure of legal recognition and cultural integration, despite periodic pressures.

What this long arc suggests is that the post-1979 enmity between Iran and Israel is a radical rupture, not the culmination of an ancient antagonism. It reveals just how thoroughly modern ideologies can override historical memory. The Islamic Republic’s anti-Zionism deliberately broke with this older Persian–Jewish familiarity. It cast Israel not as a regional peer or co-heir to monotheism, but as a colonial implant and a theological affront.

In Jerusalem, a street near the city centre bears Cyrus’s name—Rehov Koresh—reminding passersby that this Persian king, not born of Israel, once delivered its people home. And though Israel’s embassies in Tehran are long gone, when they stood, they carried an unspoken echo of that ancient gratitude.

But the twentieth century told a different story. After the birth of Israel in 1948, the Arab world snapped its teeth. Boycotts, embargoes, and belligerence followed. Yet Iran, then ruled by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi—the peacock monarch in Savile Row suits and tinted aviators—never joined the chorus. In 1950, just two years after the founding of Israel, Iran became the second Muslim-majority nation after Turkey to recognise the Jewish state, albeit with minimal fanfare. The Iranian embassy in Tel Aviv operated behind a diplomatic smokescreen, officially an “Iranian Interests Section” attached to the Swiss embassy, but in reality, a fully functioning mission. Thus began a decades-long courtship: cautious, covert, but remarkably close.

For thirty years, the two countries collaborated in a symbiotic embrace, each offering what the other lacked. Israel needed oil, access, and intelligence corridors. Iran wanted arms, training, and a hedge against the pan-Arab nationalism that threatened to engulf the region. The relationship operated at multiple levels. Israeli engineers helped construct radar installations near the Caspian Sea and trained Iranian pilots and paratroopers. Mossad and SAVAK—the Shah’s feared internal security force—ran joint operations in Iraqi Kurdistan, supporting Kurdish rebels as a means to destabilise Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The Israeli company Elta helped design Iran’s surveillance architecture. A secret oil pipeline—the Eilat–Ashkelon line—allowed Iranian crude to flow to Europe via Israel, bypassing the Suez Canal. Iran bought a 50 percent stake in the pipeline.

Diplomatic visits occurred in the shadows. Golda Meir met the Shah privately in 1972, a meeting so secret it was kept from several cabinet members. Yitzhak Rabin was once spirited into the Niavaran Palace past bewildered stewards, his name absent from any official ledger. Israeli agricultural experts travelled to Iran under commercial visas. Military officers wore civilian clothes. There were conferences on irrigation and desert farming in Tehran where Hebrew was spoken behind closed doors.

The bond was not only strategic but deeply personal for some leaders. The Shah admired Israel’s military efficiency and nation-building zeal. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, for his part, believed that the periphery strategy—aligning with non-Arab powers like Iran, Turkey, and Ethiopia—was the key to Israel’s survival. This clandestine intimacy continued right up to the eve of the Iranian Revolution, when the tapestries of diplomacy were hastily ripped down. But for a time, Israel and Iran were not enemies, not even distant allies—they were, in Ben-Gurion’s words, partners.

In 1961, Ben-Gurion paid a clandestine visit to Tehran. Meeting Iranian Prime Minister Ali Amini, he described the hush-hush nature of their friendship, reportedly saying: “Our relations are like a true love between people without their getting married. It’s preferable that way.” In other words, the two states were “in love” diplomatically, but kept it unofficial to avoid public scrutiny. Later, in 1972, Golda Meir expressed a desire to visit Iran. According to the diaries of Asadollah Alam, the Shah’s close minister of court, the Shah agreed to meet Meir on the condition the encounter be kept utterly secret. Meir did make a covert trip to Tehran on 18 May 1972, and the Shah, impressed by the then 74-year-old prime minister, later marvelled to his courtier, “That old woman has such stamina”. Meir herself joked afterward with her defence minister about “my affair with the Shah”.

The two countries would soon fall out of love. In 1979, a new face of Iran stepped out of exile and into history. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini flew back from Paris, black-robed and remote, a theologian with the gait of vengeance. The Shah fled. The revolution opened its jaws. Within days, Israel was out: its embassy shuttered, its diplomats expelled, the building handed over to the Palestine Liberation Organization. Where a Star of David once hung, a new banner unfurled—Palestine as Iran’s moral axis, Zionism as sin.

Khomeini did not bother with euphemisms. He called Israel a “cancer”, “an imposter”, “a knife in the heart of Islam”. It was not just politics. It was theological inversion. The Islamic Republic’s new identity demanded old affections be recast as betrayal. If Cyrus had been the anointed, modern Israel was apostasy. Iran needed enemies. The United States became the Great Satan. Israel, the Little.

And yet, because history is never quite done with irony, the lovers spoke again. The 1980s brought war. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran. The West, spooked by Khomeini’s rhetoric, embargoed arms. Iran bled. Its jets needed parts. Its soldiers needed bullets. And Israel, enemy of the revolution, obliged. Through clandestine deals and whispered intermediaries, Israel sold Iran over 500 million dollars worth of arms. In 1987, Israeli Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin said the quiet part aloud: “Iran is our best friend. We do not intend to change our position. The regime will not last.”

This was the Iran–Contra scandal, that morally kinked triangle where the United States, Israel and Iran traded guns for hostages for guerrillas. Everyone lied. Everyone denied. But there it was again: a marriage, this time of convenience, conducted in the long shadow of ideology.

It did not survive. By the late 1980s, Iran had learned to fight on its own. Its revolutionary identity solidified like cooling iron. It found new proxies—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Islamic Jihad in Palestine—and poured money into them. “Death to Israel” became not just a slogan but a rhythm, chanted on Quds Day, broadcast between sermons.

Israel, in turn, reoriented. The periphery doctrine that had once embraced Tehran now looked toward the Gulf. It deepened ties with Egypt and Jordan, flirted with the United Arab Emirates, and in 2020, married into the Abraham Accords. The reverse periphery had arrived. Iran, once friend, became nemesis.

And Turkey, once the original ally, drifted. Under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, it had recognised Israel in 1949. Under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it alternated between rhetorical fury and pragmatic warmth. The three old partners—Israel, Iran, and Turkey—now circled each other like bitter cousins at a broken family meal.

Today, Tehran and Tel Aviv speak only through drones and assassinations. Iranian nuclear scientists die in car bombs. Israeli embassies go on high alert. Hezbollah stockpiles missiles; Mossad responds with silence and sabotage. There is no love left.

And yet, amid this asymmetrical hostility, there remains the quiet irony of the nuclear ledger. Israel, never a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), is widely understood to possess an undeclared arsenal of nuclear warheads—estimates range from 80 to 200—housed in a doctrine of deliberate opacity. It neither confirms nor denies their existence, a posture known as “nuclear ambiguity”. Iran, by contrast, is a signatory to the NPT and has long insisted its nuclear programme is civilian in nature. And yet, in the eyes of Israel and much of the West, it is Iran that remains the greater threat—its enrichment levels scrutinised, its facilities surveilled, its scientists assassinated.

In recent years, the covert cold war between Israel and Iran has turned overt. In 2020, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the father of Iran’s nuclear programme, was assassinated outside Tehran in an operation widely attributed to Israel. In 2022, Israeli agents reportedly kidnapped and interrogated Iranian operatives inside Iran. In April 2024, Iran launched a direct drone-and-missile strike on Israeli territory, claiming retaliation for the killing of a senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander in Damascus. Though most projectiles were intercepted, it marked the first open Iranian attack on Israeli soil. The rules of proxy had begun to fray.

And then, on 13 June 2025, Israel struck Iran directly in Operation Rising Lion—nearly 200 fighter jets hitting nuclear sites, missile bases, and the homes of top generals. Tehran’s response was swift: over 100 drones launched toward Israel.

It is hard to believe that the enmity between Israel and Iran is a modern invention. Its vocabulary was forged in the furnace of ideology and hardened by decades of war. Two nations, once joined by myth and mutual need, now face each other as the deadliest of adversaries.

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